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Resources for Communication Problems

Thursday, January 31, 2008

LB351-353郁文

LB351-353郁文

Type and later translate the legend for Fig. 8.6

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P.351

I V . Naming and cognitive processes351

The Brown and Lenneberg experiment need not be reported here in any great detail. Subjects were screened for color-blindness and had to be native born American-English speakers. Their task consisted of correctly recognizing certain colors. The colors were one color (or in some experimental conditions four colors) at a time for a short period: these were the stimulus colors.

After a timed interval they viewed a large color chart (to wich we shall refer as the color context) from which they chose the colors they had been shown before the colors were identified by pointing so that no descriptive words were used either by the experimenter or the subject.

In earlier investigations the foci and borders of English name maps had been determined through Approach A; basing ourselves on this information we selected a small sample of colors (the stimulus colors) consisting of all foci and an example of each border. A few additional colors were added (only the region of high saturation was included). This yielded a sample of 24 colors. Next we used Approach B in order to obtain lists of words and descriptive phrases actually used by English speakers in order to refer to the colors in our particular sample and contex. Approach A and B together provided us with background knoeledge of the language habits that English-speaking subjects might hypothesized that there would be a relationship between the two.

The measure of name-determinacy, obtained through Approach B, was found to be highly correlated with response latency and shortness of response (as confirmed by Beare, 1963) and was called by Brown and Lenneberg codability. Codability is essentially a measure of how well people agree in giving a name to a stimulus, in our case a color. Good agreement (that is, high codability) maybe due to two independent factors: the language of the speakers may provide, through its vocabulary, a highly characteristic. Unique. And unambiguous word for a highly specific stimulus (for example, the physical color of blood): or the stimulus may in fact bequite nondescript in the language, but it is given special salience in a physical context (for instance, red hair). Codability does not distinguish these two factors.

We found codability of a color did not predict its recognizability when the recognition task was easy (one color to be identified after a seven second waiting period); however, as the task was made more difficult codability began to correlate with recognizability and the relashionship was most clearly seen in the most difficult of the tasks (four colors had to be recognized after a three minute waiting period

P.352

352Language and cognition

At first these result looked like experimental proof that under certain conditions a person’s native language may facilitate or handicap a memory-function. However, it became apparent later that the role of physical context needed to be studied further (see also Krauss and Weinheimer, 1965). Burnham and Clark (1955) conducted a color recognition experiment employing essentially the same procedure as Brown and Lenneberg but using a different sample of colors (namely the Farnsworth-Munsell Test Colors instead of the high saturation colors from the Munsell Book of colors). They found that colors differed in their recognizability as shown in Fig. 8.6 with mistakes occurring in specific directions, clearly pointing to some systematic bias in the subject’s performance. Lenneberg (1957) obtained naming data on the same stimulus material and a comparison of these data with those of Burnham and Clark (Fig. 8.4) seemed to show that the bias may be related to the semantic structure “built into” the subjects by virtue of their native English. The only difficulty with this interpretation is this. In the Brown and Lenneberg experiment appositive correlation was found between codability and recognizability, whereas the recognizability of the Burnham and Clark colors was negatively correlated with their codability. This divergence is not due to experimental artifac. Lantz (unpublished data) repeated the Burnham and Clark experiment twice with different groups of adults in different parts of the country and Lantz and Stefflre (1964) replicated the Brown and Lenneberg experiment, all with similar results.

There are strong reasons to attribute the difference in outcome of the two experiments to the peculiarities of the stimulus arrays and the physical context of the individual colors.

Burnham and Clark had hoped to eliminate by using a circular stimulus array. But Ss’ naming habits restructured the material so as to furnish certain anchoring points: namely, the boundaries between name maps. Thus a few colors acquired a distinctive feature. Whereas most of the colors, all that fell within a name region, tended to be assimilated in memory. To remember the word “green” in this task was of no help since there were so many greens: but to remember that the color was on the border of “green” and “not-green” enabled the subject to localize the stimulus color with great accuracy in the color context.

The Brown and Lenneberg study did not provide subject with any two or three outstanding landmarks for recognition, since there was no more than one color within individual name categories. The possibility of assimilating colors (or of grouping colors into classes of stimulus equivalence) was drastically reduced if not eliminated

P.353

Type and later translate the legend for Fig. 8.6 here.

On the other hand, so many colors marked boundaries, that betwixtness as such was no longer a distinctive feature.